VMs: Re: Plants in the VM - "scribe gone wild"

["PK#01" <pklist01@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jan wrote:
> in medieval manuscripts, the pictures were
> either illustrations ( i.e. of battles, events or persons) or
> embellishments - here we are apparently dealing with something
> different

I've been looking at a lot of reproductions of old manuscripts in the Royal
Library. And not those nice ones, but the "day to day" ones, legal
documents, accounts, notes. I've seen many manuscripts where the lettering
is nice and neat and then the embellishments are awful. But still the
embellishments are recognizeable as coming from the "common gene-pool" of
book illustrations of that time.

There is one quite horrid example here:
http://uair01.xs4all.nl/Voynich/Strange_Plants/Strange_plants_2.html
It's the third picture from the top (example 3).

The weird plants on the right have that surreal VMS "look and feel". But I
think it's just lack of imagination and drawing skill.

Suppose that this was one page from the VMS. Imagine that the lettering is
Voynichese and not ordinary Italian. Wouldn't we all be puzzled by the weird
illustrations?

So my hypothesis is that the VMS is just such a case of a scribe who could
write, but who couldn't draw - and did it anyway. Strange as they may be,
the illustrations are still built from the "common gene pool" of book
illustrations, but they're executed without much skill.

Let's call this my "scribe gone wild" hypothesis.

There's a way to prove it - simply by collecting more of these examples (and
I have some more up my sleeve). But is there a way to disprove it?

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